


Ain't No Sunshine

by mylittleredgirl



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Earth, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Future Fic, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 07:24:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21249623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mylittleredgirl/pseuds/mylittleredgirl
Summary: John survives until retirement. Now he has to live with it.





	Ain't No Sunshine

**Author's Note:**

> Set in a future that went AU before “Sunday” and Elizabeth’s Adventures with Replicators.

***

_Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone,_  
_And she’s always gone too long_  
_Any time she goes away._

***

John Sheppard retires at 45.

He didn’t have to. He could’ve dug his heels in and flown a desk for a few more years, maybe even in Colorado, but he’s long done with field duty, and when Doctor Hayworth suggests that he consider a slower pace of life, all he can think is _hell yes._

His knees and shoulders are shot, his back hurts all the time, even just sitting at a desk, and he still gets migraines from those damned Ngalo probes all those years ago. He did nine years of duty on Atlantis, _nine years_, and two more jetting back and forth on administrative assignments, and he’s done.

Of all the ways he expected to leave Atlantis behind, he didn’t really think it would be, well, while still standing up and breathing. The city is still there, now a bustling colonial metropolis of scientists, soldiers, and alien humans from all around the Pegasus Galaxy. The Wraith are still there, too, but they haven’t ventured outside the lines drawn up in the accords, and the war has been more or less a peacekeeping operation for years.

He doesn’t actually have a farewell tour of the city. General Keane offers him retirement while he’s in D.C., Doctor Hayworth encourages it, and he agrees with very little ceremony.

He’s lived two years out of extended-stay hotels and military apartments, and twenty years before that out of barracks of one kind or another, and it occurs to him that he’s going to have to find somewhere to live.

***

She misses the retirement dinners, but it isn’t long before Elizabeth shows up.

She’s never been to this particular apartment, but she doesn’t comment on it. They’ve moved permanently beyond small talk. He isn’t surprised that she showed up without calling first — she must have gotten the address from someone in Homeworld Security — because they’re past politeness, too. They tried politeness and small talk for a while, when he first returned to Earth to join her on the bureaucratic side of the fence. It always seemed like a bad joke, commenting on the weather or the bestseller list, because he’s seen her order air assaults in her pajamas during a surprise midnight raid on the city, and she was the only one he let near him when the Ngalo machines were drilling holes in his brain. She held him down to an infirmary bed with her body weight while he seized and retched and screamed until Carson could knock him out with sedatives. He’s gotten blood all over her clothes, more than once.

After that, they settled into on-and-off silence, punctuated by business meetings and the occasional eight-hour catch-up dinner at a restaurant that ends with the waitstaff all but begging them to leave and John wanting nothing more than five more minutes. She’s not just a former coworker, not just a trusted friend, an ally, or the most important person in the world, long-lost. Since she left the city, he has never quite known what to do with her, but they always seem to make do.

She hugs him when he opens the door. They do that now.

“So, you’re done,” she says, echoing all his thoughts in three little words.

“Yeah,” he answers, and invites her in before going to the kitchen to make coffee.

***

There’s a lot of things they don’t talk about.

Why she left, for one, but that’s because they burned out on that long ago. He was so angry at Earth, at General Hammond, at Elizabeth for going along with it, that even Teyla — who knew nothing of Earth politicking — warned him that he was jeopardizing his own role in the expedition by being so belligerent. The higher-ups wanted Elizabeth out, and they weren’t altogether happy with him, either. Rumor has it that she had a nervous breakdown during her first year back, which would explain away the blank months on her C.V., but he never asks her about that, either.

He didn’t break down after he failed his third physical and General Keane created a liaison position for him behind the lines, but he mixes beer with his prescription painkillers more than he should.

She asks, “What are you going to do now?”

He’s suddenly aware of how none of his boxes are unpacked, and they’re all stacked in the corner of the living room, in view. There aren’t many of them.

“Nothing. That’s the point of retirement.”

Elizabeth’s hair was going gray before she left the city, but it’s meticulously dyed now. He never thought of her as vain, but really, when he knew her, she never had time to be.

“That is _not_ the point of retirement, John.”

He turns the tables on her. “What are _you_ going to do?”

“_I’m_ still gainfully employed,” she reminds him. “I’m off to Sudan in the morning, actually.”

He wonders if she came here the night before she had to leave on purpose, so she’d have an excuse not to stay long. “How very glamorous.”

“Very.”

He wants to ask her to stay, but the words don’t come out, and anyway, they’ve never worked before.

***

Rodney’s sister, of all people, comes to see him. Her daughter is planning to apply as an international student to Georgetown in a few years (or less, given her genetic brilliance), which puts Jeannie in the neighborhood. With Rodney still in another galaxy — the Asgard one this time, last John heard — he’s somehow the next-best thing.

He meets her at a café instead of inviting her over, because he still hasn’t unpacked.

“You look great,” he tells her, after polite exchanges about how he’s disappointed he doesn’t get to see Madison and how he really will get up to Canada to visit them someday, now that he has the time.

“Thanks,” Jeannie says. “You look... older.” It doesn’t happen often — especially since John is really only in Christmas-card contact with the Millers — but sometimes Jeannie will be just blunt enough to remind him that she and Rodney really do fall from the same tree.

He doesn’t have a comeback to that. How he looks in the mirror is nothing compared to how old he _feels_.

“So,” she says, as everyone does, “what are you going to do now?”

“I’m exploring my options.”

She accepts this, and finally asks, brow furrowed, “Have you heard from him?”

Rodney accused him of giving up when he accepted the job on Earth, abandoning them. John isn’t sure that Rodney has forgiven him yet — though, practically, he knows that Rodney is easily distracted by shiny objects with superior technological value, and probably only notices once a month that John, or Elizabeth, or any of them are even gone.

“The SGC has. He’s doing well, last I heard. Driving the Asgard crazy. He’s still doing a lot of great stuff.”

Jeannie glows with sisterly pride and just a little moral superiority. “Well, saving the planet isn’t _everything._”

John smiles, but it catches a little. “It was fun while it lasted,” he dismisses it, trying not to sound jealous that Rodney still gets to yank the universe from the jaws of death on a semi-regular basis.

She pats his hand in sympathy. “So, what about you? Are you finally going to settle down now? I told you about my friend Danielle, teaches over at Georgetown...”

He declines, and she isn’t surprised. He’s gone on dates since returning to earth, here and there, but traveling as much as he does — did — makes relationships impractical. Now that he’s done with that life, it just sounds like work. He’d have to lie to a girlfriend every day, about the headaches and the nightmares and everything that was most important to him in his life, and he’s not up to that yet.

Jeannie hugs him before getting into a taxi, once coffee is over. “Take care of yourself.”

***

He does a lot of walking around the block. He can’t go too far without his knees starting to complain, but his back hurts if he sits on his couch too long, so he goes out. There’s a bar on the corner that opens at four; earlier in the day, he’ll walk to the smoke & convenience shop, buy newspapers, and scan the World sections for mentions of Africa.

Even after all this time, it feels like he’s failing in his duty whenever she goes into dangerous territory without him.

After two weeks, there’s a page 2 headline, behind the football riots in the U.K., of talks stalled, official U.N. statements, gunfire outside the embassy, suspected involvement from foreign parties. 8 dead, 13 wounded.

He knows the print would be bolder, bigger, if any of those casualties had been American, but his heart feels like it’s struggling through molasses just to beat until he gets Colonel Davis on the phone, who puts him right through to General Keane. Elizabeth is working for the U.N. this time, not Homeworld Security, but the General will know where she is. No one with Elizabeth’s security clearance is out of sight for long.

“She’s okay, John,” Keane assures him. He doesn’t sound surprised to hear from him, though John has been studiously ignoring the polite invitations to state functions for a month now. “I talked to her myself. Not even rattled; you know how she is.”

John can breathe easier, but his heart is still racing like he’s trapped. “She’s been through a hell of a lot worse,” he agrees. He watched most of those up close. Reading about it in a corner store on their own planet should be easier than that. Than this.

Keane says, seriously, “John, if anything ever happens, you know you’ll be the first person I call.”

Everyone assumes something happened between them on Atlantis, something to warrant his being notified before her next of kin, and they’re right and wrong. It was never what they’re thinking, because they were coworkers, because they were friends, because they had all the time in the world until she was recalled after six short years and they never really recovered.

He thanks the General, hangs up, and tries to put thoughts of a state funeral out of his head.

***

He takes short trips, to amusement parks, to the Smithsonian, to New York to visit some buddies he’s had since before he ever heard of the Stargate. He doesn’t go near the ocean; he’s been there since returning to Earth, and the crowded, dingy water is always disappointing.

He and Elizabeth used to joke about retirement on particularly late nights on Atlantis, when they were overcaffeinated and underslept and punchy on stress. She talked about long, lazy days on the beach with nothing to do but apply sunscreen. He talked about surfing and skiing, and if it was really late, he joked about helping her with her sunscreen in between catching waves. The details weren’t particularly important, because neither of them expected to live that long.

He still thinks about skiing and surfing, but his body is falling apart. Instead, he reads a lot. He plays pool at the bar two blocks from his place, and he contemplates taking up golf.

His buddies in New York, the ones he knew when he was 25 and invincible, make fun of him for being an old man already. He takes the abuse gamely, but feels like he has nothing left in common with them, and he can’t remember what he was like when he did.

He calls up Carson, who’s busy curing alien cancer at Area 51. Even Carson makes fun of him about the golf and the bar on the corner, using his _concerned voice_.

“I heard about the embassy,” Carson says, after the jokes wear thin.

“Elizabeth’s fine,” John replies, and he hates that she didn’t even call him. That she no longer _has_ to call him, because they don’t share a chain of command anymore. He’s not waiting in the wings to rescue her. Couldn’t, even if she needed him to.

Absurdly, because Elizabeth is the one overseas and in danger of being shot, Carson says, “She’d be worried about you, too.”

John can picture her face, to the detail, the way she looked when she was packing to leave Atlantis. He was too angry to really look at her at the time, but when he thinks of her now, that’s usually the image he sees.

***

Elizabeth calls him.

It’s the middle of the afternoon, but he was sleeping off a migraine and is groggy as hell when he answers. She worries she got the time zones wrong, and his heart is pounding because her voice used to wake him from sleep all the time, and there was almost always an emergency.

His head still hurts. He remembers cold compresses, whispered conversations in the infirmary, and her hand in his, squeezing.

“How go the talks?”

“Good,” she hedges.

“By which you mean impending global disaster?”

He can _hear_ her smile, which means he doesn’t really mind when she tells him, “By which I mean classified, unfortunately.”

“I’m hurt.” His security clearance doesn’t cover goings-on inside Earth’s atmosphere.

“Everything _is_ going fine,” she assures him, but he knows her, and he knows her voice even after five years of only occasional contact, and one glance at the clock and quick mental calculations tells him it’s close to three in the morning where she is.

“Elizabeth, did something happen?” He asks it like it’s an order, like he’s about to throw on boots and a puddle-jumper and get her the hell out of there himself.

“A lot,” she says. “I’m just tired, and Roger...” she’s the only one who calls General Keane by his first name, “Roger said you asked about me. I wanted to call you, after, but-”

“It’s okay. It’s not like you have to anymore.”

“Still feels weird, doesn’t it?”

She’s brilliant at what she does, but he knows how it takes a toll on her. He used to sit up with her in her office, lounging on her couch and tossing in a joke or two as she pored over paperwork for hours on end, because she never slept during tense negotiations and because, after a few years of working together, he didn’t either.

He wants to be in the Sudan bringing her coffee, instead of napping on the couch because his head hurt too much to make it to his bed.

“You’re being careful, right?”

She laughs. “John, I’m a diplomat. After the scare outside the embassy, I’m lucky if they let me go to the bathroom by myself. I haven’t been outside in two weeks.”

“Good.” After the ‘scare’, he got the names of her security detail from Keane. Their records are good, better than your average diplomatic babysitters, but he still wishes she could have taken someone who served with them in Atlantis, so he’d know their capabilities. “Still wish I was there.”

She’s quiet for a moment, and he can almost feel her hand in his, squeezing, like they’re back in the infirmary. “I wish you were here, too.”

***

He finds a better rental, an unfurnished townhouse, and buys necessities online that arrive fully assembled. He forgets cups, though, and so drinks water out of the sink and whiskey — he’s graduated up from beer — from the bottle.

He’s still got most of his personal stuff in boxes stacked in the corner, opened and dug-through whenever he needs something, and he’s catching up on eleven years of television.

Elizabeth comes home, and when she shows up at his door — unannounced, as usual — she says, “You look like hell,” and hugs him, like they do now.

“So do you,” he replies, and she does look exhausted and too thin, but she’s the best thing he’s seen in weeks.

“I’m thinking you’ve got a good racket going here. Retirement. Definitely the way to go.”

He knows the negotiations were successful — he gets the paper delivered now, and there was a piece about a timetable for U.N. involvement — but she’s been gone almost two months, and she’s brokered interplanetary alliances with quadrupeds quicker than this.

“You’ll never retire,” he chides her, because he’s never really seen her _do nothing_ before. He used to have dreams about that, when the city was under constant attack, imagined being somewhere safe with her and just _resting_. Talking about nothing. Getting closer, in a different way than the desperate closeness that was cemented every time one of them nearly died.

“I never thought you would, either,” she says, and shrugs.

He never thought she’d do a lot of things — like going back to negotiating Earth-bound squabbles for the U.N., for one — but he doesn’t want to think about that now, when he hasn’t seen in her in two months.

“Want me to order pizza?” He knew her favorite toppings even when they were living in another galaxy. Fortunately, she never changes her order.

“Please.”

***

He offers her a two-liter of coke when she asks for something to wash down the pizza — “Forgot to buy glasses,” — and she gives him that look she has that’s bemused and concerned and kind all at once.

“I’ll bring you some of mine next time I’m here,” she offers.

“You don’t need to do that.”

“Can I just bring _one_ over for me, then?”

He’s startled by the sound of his own laugh. “I promise I’ll buy cups, okay? Any particular color? Theme? Cartoon character?”

“Hmm, I’m partial to Minnie.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah, had the whole bedspread ensemble as a kid. I walked around with Minnie Mouse ears for my entire year of kindergarten.”

He can’t believe he’s known her this long and never seen baby pictures. “They were your one personal item, weren’t they? You know, I heard stories about a mysterious creature with mouse ears lurking the halls late at night...”

“Stop. And get me a beer.”

They never really got the chance to do this on Atlantis, certainly not with genuine pizza and beer, but this, Elizabeth with her bare feet curled underneath her on his new couch and him laughing more than he’s done in months or years, this feels like home.

The feeling chokes him, tired anger welling to the surface about everything they missed out on.

He doesn’t know what would have happened if she’d stayed, if their timing would have ever been right. He still feels that flutter sometimes when he’s next to her or thinking about her, that feeling that says he’s just a little out of control but it’s okay because it’s _her_, and she’s the one person he never thought would let him down. Even if nothing ever happened between them, it would have been better than this.

“Are you still getting headaches?”

He’s a few drinks in, _was_ a few drinks in when she arrived, and she’s no longer his boss with the power to pull him from a mission, so he answers her honestly. “Yeah. They keep getting worse.”

Her expression fills with sympathy. “I wish there was something I could do.”

This is enough, he wants to say. Being here. Pretending we’re still okay.

Instead, because he’s drunk, he says: “You shouldn’t have left.”

Her face darkens, and he’s apologizing, taking the words back before she can respond:

“I’m sorry. Elizabeth, forget I said anything. I didn’t—”

She puts her beer down. “If I’d stayed, it wouldn’t have made a difference.”

Major Lorne would still have died on Genii. John would still have been stranded with a crashed jumper, alone on an uninhabited planet eating grass for six weeks until McKay and the Daedalus managed to find him. His back would still be mangled, the city would still have fallen into and out of military control, the surviving Wraith would still have gone back into hibernation. If she hadn’t compromised with the IOA, agreed to go back to Earth and then lobbied for the team from there, their support would have been scaled back and their budget slashed. The whole expedition could have fallen apart.

If she had stayed, it wouldn’t have made a difference to anyone but him.

“Forget it. I’m just drunk. I didn’t mean it.”

He can tell she’s reading him like a book, and not one of her favorites. “Yes, you meant it. And that’s not fair. You haven’t _been_ fair about this.”

She stands up, arms crossed, and even with her hair dyed and clothes from a shopping mall instead of a quartermaster, she looks the same as she always did.

“I didn’t leave _you_, John,” she snaps, and he recalls the time when he swallowed his pride and asked her to stay. _So tell them to fuck off. I need you here._ And like a slap in the face, she said: _This isn’t about you._ She continued on after that, saying it wasn’t about _her_ either, or about anything except the city and the IOA and doing what she had to do to save the team, but he only really remembers the first part. It wasn’t about him.

She’s still talking. Her voice rises, and he realizes she’s a little drunk, too. “You took it personally, and that _wasn’t fair_ to me.”

“It _was_ personal. It _should_ have been personal,” he says, and even he doesn’t really know what he means.

After a long silence, she’s the one who apologizes. It’s always her.

He calls her a cab.

She gets her purse and says, “I’ll call you about dinner next week. Okay?”

She looks exhausted, and he wants to hold her until he can apologize for the past ten minutes and the past five years.

Stronger words don’t come, so he says what he can. “Dinner. I’ll hold you to that,” and he hopes she still knows him well enough to understand.

***

He falls asleep on the couch and dreams about her.

He dreams she didn’t go, that she stayed and he kissed her. Her hair and clothes and smile are back to normal. They’re back on Atlantis, where they belong.

He can breathe the salty air here, and she feels real. He knows he’s dreaming, but that knowledge only lasts a moment, only until she touches him, and then he forgets easily. He tastes her skin as he always wanted to but never did, kisses down her throat, feels her pulse, live and quick against his mouth.

They never did this, never made love on one of those Atlantis cots, but the fantasy feels so familiar when she touches him that it’s like coming home. His clothing is peeled off and she trails kisses down his chest, her hair tickling his skin as she soothes the scars on his ribs. She’s above him, taking the lead, pinning his hands to the bed with a gentleness that doesn’t surprise him because it’s _Elizabeth_, and even her tough love always felt kind. He lets her hold him there, powerless. He doesn’t care how she takes him, not when it’s her, because she’s been away for so long and he just wants to watch and feel and see her and remember this, forever, as long as he can.

In his dream, she’s naked and so, so beautiful. Her legs slip between his as he struggles to keep all their limbs in place on the small bed, and then her lips find his again. She’s breathing words against him, but he can’t hear her, only kisses and kisses her until he can’t breathe, pulls her closer until there’s nothing between them but skin and air. She feels the way he always hoped she would, perfect and warm and willing.

He wants to talk to her, opens his mouth to ask her if this is real, and something about that breaks the spell.

John gasps awake, hard and confused, back seizing from sleeping on the couch. His back hurts, his dick, his head, and all he can do is lie there trying to breathe until he can move enough to walk to the bathroom and grab the muscle relaxants that will knock him out for another half a day.

When he sees himself in the mirror, very different from the John Sheppard in his dream — the one who was still a soldier and a commander and still looked his age — he laughs unkindly.

“God,” he mutters. “Elizabeth...”

He doesn’t finish his thought. He can never tell her what he’s thinking, even when she’s not there.

He falls asleep again, but this time he’s drugged, and he doesn’t dream.

***

When he wakes up again, he doesn’t know what day it is, and Elizabeth is standing in his bedroom doorway.

“You left your front door unlocked,” she informs him.

“Wha—?”

“I came to get my car. John, you look like hell.”

“You _woke me up_,” he mutters, sliding his legs over the side of the bed carefully, waiting a minute to psych up his muscles before he stands.

There’s no sympathy. “I called you six times before coming over. Did you keep drinking after I left?”

He heard the phone, now that he thinks about it. “Had a headache,” he retorts, pressing both hands to his face.

Cool hands are on his shoulders, Elizabeth’s, and she guides him back to sitting. “Have you told Doctor Hayworth how bad they are?”

Hayworth is stationed in Colorado, only coming to D.C. every quarter to report. It didn’t seem right to bother her when all she was going to do was refill his prescriptions, do a thousand tests, and conclude that there’s really nothing that can be done for him. There’s still residue from the Ngalo probes in his head. It’s inactive, it’s not going to kill him, it’s just going to hurt like a bitch for the rest of his life.

Elizabeth’s right, though. It wasn’t this bad before. He survived four years of active duty after his encounter with Ngalo technology before the frequent migraines, along with everything else, sent him back to Earth. He was still flying missions with this junk in his head once upon a time, and now he can barely get out of bed.

Elizabeth disappears and — ridiculously — returns with a bowl full of water. “Drink,” she orders. “I’m going to Colorado Springs tomorrow morning to consult with General Mitchell. You’re coming with me.”

“I’m retired,” he points out, as sternly as he can manage through the headache and while he’s spilling water all over himself from a cereal bowl because he forgot to buy glasses.

She brushes a hand over his cheek, rough with three-day beard. “That wasn’t a suggestion, Colonel.” She practically whispers it, and that, and the way her fingertips shake as they scratch over his skin, is what does him in.

“Yes, ma’am.”

***

Doctor Hayworth runs her tests and manages not to look disgusted at the results, but just barely.

She gives him a daily exercise regimen and strict orders to get fresh air, see a physical therapist, and take his medications at the actual prescribed intervals. Lose ten pounds. A regular sleep schedule. No alcohol. “Eat some damned vegetables, already,” she says.

He doesn’t recall Hayworth being quite as forward with him when he was still in uniform, but perhaps he didn’t need his ass kicked quite as badly then.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And find something to _do_ while you’re at it,” she advises.

“Hey, _you_ were the one who told me to slow down.”

She raises an eyebrow and signs his chart with a flourish. “This wasn’t what I had in mind, sir.”

John finds Elizabeth in the briefing room. It’s his fourth guess, after the General’s office and the cafeteria and the control room. It looks exactly the same as it did three months ago, the last time he was here on business, and it feels weird to be in civilian clothes. When he got dressed that morning, he thought that would make it easier, make him remember that he’s here as a patient and a has-been and not as an active member of the Stargate program.

Elizabeth is alone, looking down at the Stargate and the perpetual bustle of soldier and technician activity surrounding it. John got used to the appearance of the Earth ‘gate after he was back for a while, but it still looks rickety and stone-age compared to what they had in Atlantis.

Most things on Earth do.

She hears him approach. His stealth training is out of date.

“Clean bill of health?”

He shrugs, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “I need to get a hobby.”

“Bridge,” she says.

“What?”

“Bridge. That was mine.”

His back is starting to bug him after all the wandering around the SGC, so he sits down in the General’s chair at the head of the table and waits for her explanation.

“When I left Atlantis. That year. It was either start playing bridge with General Keane’s wife and her country club friends, or check myself into St. Elizabeth’s for observation.”

John feels a flutter of panic, the way he usually does when things get close to personal territory, but he shoves it down. This is Elizabeth. This is _him_. He wants to know.

“I don’t think they use that asylum anymore.”

She shrugs. “You know what I mean. Are you going to be okay?”

“Sure. You know me.”

“Yes,” she says. “I do.”

He glances behind him, making sure they’re still alone before asking, “The year you left... how bad was it?”

It’s personal, _really_ personal, but he needs to know. He feels like he’s drowning here, and like he’s the only one who ever has.

“I missed you. You all. A lot. It was hard to get over.” She sighs, looking down at the ‘gate room again. “If we’re being honest, I don’t think I ever have.”

The Stargate below them whooshes open. A team of people he doesn’t know marches up the ramp, heading somewhere, and if John could still run, he’d think about grabbing Elizabeth’s hand and following them, getting the hell off this rock.

Instead, he says, “Have dinner with me.”

She checks her watch. “Oh, John, I’m sorry. While you were in the infirmary, I had a late lunch with General Mitchell.”

“I can wait.”

She smiles. “Okay.”

“I never—” the words stall in his throat, and he runs them over in his head a few times. Atlantis. Pegasus. The expedition. _You._ “I never got over it either.”

Elizabeth closes her eyes for a long moment, like she does when she’s exhausted, or trying not to look like she thinks they’re all doomed. He saw that look a lot in Atlantis. It’s oddly reassuring.

“Well, then,” she finally says, “let’s round up another pair of losers and I’ll teach you to play bridge.”

***

Elizabeth accompanies him home from the airport, because the cabin pressure on the plane started to mess with the holes in his head and she didn’t want him passing out in a cab.

“We’ve talked about how you’re too much of a mother hen,” he mutters from the passenger seat of her car. They haven’t talked about that for years, actually, but it’s all still true.

“Yes, we have,” she patronizes. “And unless you want to _keep_ having this discussion, you’ll start taking better care of yourself.”

Even though his head is pounding, he smiles, feeling warm and happy. It’s been a long time since anyone took care of him, and here she is, hauling him to Colorado and driving him home to dump his sorry ass in bed. He thinks of bridge and everything she said and didn’t say in the SGC briefing room, and he wonders who was there for _her_.

When they make it back to his place, she brings water to his bedside — they bought a set of glasses in the Cincinnati airport, of all places, during the layover between flights, and the glasses all say “Gettin’ Lucky in Kentucky” — and she turns off the light.

“You don’t have to go,” he says.

He doesn’t remember her answer, but when he wakes up, his living room has been tidied, the souvenir Kentucky glassware is all washed and drying on his kitchen counter, and Elizabeth is asleep on his couch. One of her slip-on shoes is dangling precariously from her toes.

He should be embarrassed that she was _cleaning his place_, and how many old Chinese-food boxes and dirty clothes that means she had to touch, but this is Elizabeth. This, her _here_ and surrounded by the messiness of his life on Earth, still seems more like the future he hoped for than anything that has actually happened.

Her shoe drops to the floor and she stirs awake. She yawns, and he remembers how she used to fall asleep next to him when they wrote reports together in the lounge, and how that always made him feel good. Strong. Like she trusted him, and even like he deserved it.

He misses that feeling. He remembers standing guard over her in the infirmary, keeping a nervous watch whenever nanites or alien possession or, once, a freak alien flu virus laid her low. At the time, he thought that was the worst, most helpless feeling in the world; now, strangely, he thinks he’d give anything to have that again.

“Hey,” she says blearily. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep. Are you feeling better?”

“Yeah. Want dinner?”

What he really wants is a stiff drink, but that’s habit now. The painkillers make his brain prickle in a way he hates, and as much as alcohol muffled that, Doctor Hayworth pointed out it also washes away a lot of the medication’s effectiveness.

He offers, “Pizza again?”

She raises an eyebrow. “You really know how to treat a guest.”

They walk to the so-so Greek restaurant a few blocks away, where she nags at him to eat a salad, and he encourages her to order dessert. He’s still gritting his teeth against a headache, but some of his smiles are genuine, and the staff have to chase them out at the end of the night.

“I’m going to New York next week,” she tells him on the walk home. “You can come, if you want.”

He bristles. “You don’t need to do that.” He doesn’t need a babysitter, he just needs to figure things out.

“That’s not what I meant.” She sighs. “John, I know... things have never been the same between us since I was recalled, so I could be out of line.” She takes a breath and doesn’t look at him. “If you want me to leave you alone for a while, I will.”

It’s a statement of fact, but he finds himself listening for guilt in her voice, or accusation. There’s probably both, hiding in there somewhere. She was the one who agreed to leave Atlantis five years ago, even after he asked her to stay, but he’s the one who blamed her. Since then, they’ve just been... stuck, and he’s tired. He misses her.

“I never wanted that, Elizabeth.”

Her fingers brush his as they walk. “Okay, then tell me: how can I help?”

He slips his hand into hers. Her fingers are cool, and that makes him squeeze them, reflexively trying to warm her up.

He can’t ask her to stay, not again.

“Come back,” he says instead, “after you go to New York. I’ll buy dinner.”

She laughs, sounding relieved. “_I’ll_ buy, if you drive me to the airport.”

She hugs him goodnight at his front door and kisses his cheek, and even through the painkillers prickling in his brain, he feels like he’s waking up.

***

After New York, Elizabeth goes back to Africa, then to Russia, then a quick detour to M8X-441, and then spends months on end going back and forth between New York and Geneva, Colorado Springs and Washington, D.C.

He doesn’t play bridge with General Keane’s wife, but Keane’s grandson is just old enough to start playing Pop Warner football, and John takes a deep breath and volunteers himself as assistant coach.

It’s been a decade since he taught Jinto and Wex to throw a pigskin around, and almost as long since he’s spent quality time with kids, but he looks forward all week to the practices and games and twenty 7-9 year old boys all talking at once and crawling all over him.

His back and knees protest the rough-housing, of course, but he bears it because this feels good, as so few things have in far too long. Elizabeth seems less worried when she looks at him now, when she’s in D.C. between assignments. She comes to the games when she’s in town and sits with the General and his family, cheering loudly for John’s perpetually losing Mighty Mites.

Afterwards, they have dinner, or watch movies at his place — better than a theater, because he doesn’t have to sit still for two hours if his back is bothering him. It feels strange, watching movies with her and playing chess. They did these things on Atlantis, of course, when they were desperate for down-time, but they were never more than five inches from their radios and someone was always interrupting. When talking about nothing gets to be too strange, she tells him as much as she can about where she’s been, and he lies about how well he does in her absence.

He asks leading questions to suss out how she’s really doing, and he can tell she’s doing the same to him. He hasn’t been dragged back to the SGC, so he guesses that means he’s doing all right.

Things are better, but they still feel wrong, and he’s pretty sure they’ll always feel that way. It’s like he cheated death on Atlantis, coming back alive from all those missions that blew up in his face, and now he’s in limbo, just... waiting.

When she’s gone, he reads the paper. When she’s in D.C., he only skims it, to see where she might be going next. He coaches football and goes to physical therapy for his back and hates that he lives in the middle of a densely populated suburb where he can’t see the stars.

When she comes back from Colorado, she calls him for a ride from the airport. He’s told her again and again that he’s glad to drive her whenever she needs him to — _It’ll be like old times_, he jokes, though he won’t be flying her through any wormholes — but she’s hesitant to push her luck, so she only calls him occasionally. He has thought about weaseling her flight numbers out of his former coworkers and showing up unannounced, but that seems like it might fall on the wrong side of stalking, so he usually just sits around waiting.

“How is everyone?” he asks on the drive home.

She seems distracted. “Carson’s back at the SGC. I had lunch with him.”

“Oh. I haven’t spoken to him since—”

“I went to Atlantis,” she announces, cutting him off. “No emergency, don’t worry. Colonel Davis asked me to go with him to debrief the command team.”

He feels like he’s being squeezed. That was part of his job, the past few years, and he never got used to being an observer. When he retired, he thought that not going at all would be better than going for a day to see people he doesn’t know manning familiar stations, and then having to go back to Earth without even getting to see the Mainland or visit the Athosians or have lunch out on the pier.

But this... this might be worse. One of these days, there _will_ be an emergency, and he won’t even hear about it unless Elizabeth decides to tell him in violation of his new, retired security clearance. He remembers how Rodney accused him of abandoning them, how John blamed Elizabeth for that same thing, and he forces himself to breathe through the tightness of his throat.

“How was it?” he asks, because he can still ask that, at least.

“Different.” She hasn’t been there in a long time, almost a year. “Not too many of the old guard left.” She looks down at her hands. “It was hard to leave again.”

He wants to pull the car over and hug her at the quiet defeat in her voice, but they’re on the Beltway, so he says instead, “This sucks. This just... completely sucks.”

She chokes out a laugh. “Yes, John, it does. But I guess... living through it beats the alternative.”

Her flippant statement is too morbid, and too much like what he’s been thinking about lately, so he lets it hang there without comment.

***

She asks him again, “What are you going to do now?”

He bought reclining lawn chairs, and they’re using them on his back porch, which gets a fair dose of muggy D.C. summer heat and sun along with the noise pollution. Elizabeth is reading the new Michael Ondaatje and he’s reading Bulgakov — _The Master and Margarita_ — a recommendation of hers when he mentioned that he never did pick up Russian literature again after the whole _War and Peace_ fiasco.

It takes him a moment to draw himself out of the book. “Like... right now?”

“No, John.” Elizabeth pulls off her reading glasses. “Retirement doesn’t suit you. You must see that.”

The lazy summer day has been so nice that it takes him a moment to remember that he _is_ retired, and that he pretty much hates it. He can’t do a thing to protect anyone he ever cared about, and he spends his time lying to strangers he meets on the football sidelines or at the chiropractor about who he is and where he’s been, if anyone even asks.

He’s not lying, though, when he says, “This... is really nice.”

Elizabeth smiles a half-smile and then curls up around her book. He remembers that late-night game of theirs and her pipe dream of the beach and sunscreen and nothing at all to do, and he thinks this would be a whole lot better if she wasn’t heading off to Moscow on Wednesday.

***

There are rules when it comes to security clearance, and there are rules. After everything they’ve been through, she doesn’t usually flinch at telling him where she’s going, and he believes her when she says she doesn’t know how long she’ll be gone.

He’s not worried, though, because it’s Russia. Last time she went to Moscow she came back tired and frustrated and cursing in Russian when she stubbed her toe, but there’s no one shooting at her. Even better, other Homeworld Security officials are there with her, because she’s in the preliminary steps of proposing a nuclear disarmament plan assisted by Stargate technology. Out of habit, he keeps an eye on the news despite the classified nature of her mission, and there’s nothing out of the ordinary until he reads the headlines: ‘TWELVE AMERICANS DEAD; HOSTAGE CRISIS IN SUDAN; U.N. PEACEKEEPING MISSION COLLAPSES’ from the associated press in Khartoum.

He knows even before she calls him in the middle of the night that she’ll be going there. “I’m leaving Moscow,” is all she really has time to say. “There’s a more pressing assignment. I’ll be out of touch.”

He says something stupid, something like ‘don’t drink the water,’ because he’s too rattled to remember the things she used to say to him when he was the one heading into a war zone. Come back in one piece. Keep your head down. Be safe. She said those things a lot, back in Atlantis, but she has to end the phone conversation before he can pass along the sentiment.

It takes a whole week before he can track General Keane down for any details. The General is in Moscow when he calls, coordinating with the Russian Stargate Program since Elizabeth was pulled off the case, and Colonel Davis doesn’t know or won’t talk.

The General comes back after a week and a half, and John makes the drive to his office. Davis has the decency to at least look guilty as he tells him to go ahead in.

“General, I know this isn’t strictly Stargate related, but—”

“She’s in Khartoum,” Keane confirms without hesitation. “Emergency summit. They’re trying to stop the bleeding, get their people out, arrange a new timetable for U.N. involvement and emergency assistance the Sudanese will allow. It’ll hit the papers soon enough.”

“She’s not a hostage negotiator,” John argues, although he knows from experience that Elizabeth is a little bit of everything.

He just _really_ doesn’t like the sound of ‘emergency summit.’ They had a few of those on Atlantis, during their attempts to form a confederation of Pegasus planets against the Wraith. Two of three ‘emergency summits’ were bombed by inside parties, and the last was attacked by a hive ship. She survived those relatively unscathed, but back then, he was there with her.

“She’s not working alone,” Keane reminds him, “but the Sudanese have worked with her, and the U.N. wants her. She’s the best they’ve got.”

He tries one more argument: “This thing with Russia, and the Stargate. That’s important.” If Homeworld Security threw its weight around, if Keane requested it, if the President ordered it, Elizabeth would be sent back to Moscow no matter _what_ was going on elsewhere on Earth.

It’s a stupid thing to say, a stupid thing to _think_, and that’s probably why the General doesn’t acknowledge it.

“Go home, John,” he says instead.

He does, because that’s all he can do.

***

He ends up practically in traction by working out “beyond physician recommended limits,” and loses two weeks to muscle relaxants and the persistent drone of CNN on the television in his bedroom.

It’s been six weeks, and not a word. Even the news is relatively silent, focusing more on the new E.U. trade laws and the escalated War On Drugs, but what he hears is mostly bad, and none of it points to her coming home anytime soon.

John finishes _The Master and Margarita_, Elizabeth’s Ondaatje novel that she left at his place, half the _Master and Commander_ series from the library, and then starts again on _War and Peace_, for old time’s sake. Carson comes to visit when he’s in town meeting with Keane and the IOA, but that’s not much of a distraction, because a special news segment is on and they end up just watching CNN together.

He doesn’t hear from Keane. He dusts off his uniform and goes to a State dinner, even, but the General doesn’t make it and all Davis can tell him is that he hasn’t heard anything new.

“No news is good news,” he reminds him, and while that’s true, it’s not really helping John sleep at night.

He wants her mission to be successful, but he’d also settle for it falling apart completely, if that meant she could get the hell out of there.

She calls him once, and it’s three in the morning, but he’s not about to complain. “Elizabeth! Are you okay?”

She either laughs or whimpers — the connection is terrible. “I’m so tired,” she admits. “The talks are progressing, I guess.”

“That doesn’t sound particularly reassuring.”

“God,” she says, “It’s good to hear your voice.”

He wants to reach through the phone right then and pull her to him, get her out of the war zone and the responsibilities weighing down her voice and just... protect her.

“When will you be back?”

The phone crackles and when it clears, she’s just finishing saying that she doesn’t know.

“This is taking forever,” she groans, and he has never known her to be impatient with things like this. Normally, she’s the one counseling him that delicate negotiations take time, and he can’t expect punch and cookies after the very first day. “John, I have no idea if I’m doing any good here. It’s just... it’s too much, you know?”

He’s rarely heard her sound this worn out, and he’s seen just about every mood she has.

“You could always quit,” he baits her, knowing she’ll rally out of pride, but he’s at least half serious.

“I can’t quit.”

“I know. You’re the best, and the world would fall apart without you.”

“_John._”

He wants to be having this conversation with her in person, some way other than a crackly phone conversation that’s going to have to end any minute. He wants to be able to squeeze her hand and see in her face if his words are making any difference. He remembers this feeling, this gut-wrenching helplessness, from that first year when he was in Atlantis and she wasn’t, and he never got to _talk_ to her without General O’Neill or General Keane standing over her shoulder in the communication window.

It was different then, because she wasn’t really _in danger_, just _gone_, but it was also the same.

“How are _you_?” she asks.

“Oh, you know. Running marathons.”

“You’d better not be,” she chides, and it’s the first time in the conversation that she sounds like herself. “I expect you to be in one piece when I get back, mister.”

He laughs, because there’s nothing else he can do. “Same to you.”

***

The BBC gets the news before the American press: the U.N. has pulled out of Sudan. Diplomatic channels are closed. The hostages, all except three, are dead.

Elizabeth is in one of the accompanying pictures, standing behind someone with her head down as the U.N. negotiators are escorted, at gunpoint, out of the former embassy. He can’t see enough of her face to tell if she’s all right, if she’s hurt or tired or angry or scared, but he knows it’s her from just her hair and shoulder, and he can’t breathe.

Stalkerish or not, John calls Davis for her itinerary. She’s in London, then New York. Debriefing with the security council, teleconference with the President, meetings, meetings, meetings.

On the day she’s scheduled to get back, John waits for her at the airport. He hasn’t heard from her, but that doesn’t have to mean anything — she’s always run ragged during U.N. debriefings and is lucky if she gets five minutes to eat a sandwich.

She’s okay. She must be. John can come up with as many paranoid fantasies as he wants to, but he knows that if she were hurt, if anything happened to her during the withdraw, someone would have told him.

He sees her at the security exit before she sees him. She looks exhausted, head down, but she walks like she’s unhurt and John feels a rush of energy so sharp that he practically sprints toward her across the airport lobby.

“Elizabeth!”

She smiles, faintly. Her eyes are glazed over, like she barely recognizes him through however many consecutive weeks she’s been awake.

“You’re late,” he accuses her. She was supposed to be on the 8:05 flight from New York.

“I missed my boarding call. The President called while I was at the gate. I’m sure my luggage is lost forever.”

“I guess the President’s a pretty good excuse. Are you hungry?” She needs to eat something. Her face is thinner than it was when she left, and she probably hasn’t had a decent cup of coffee in two months.

Elizabeth opens her mouth to answer, then covers her face with her hands and groans. “God, I’ll bet everything in my fridge has grown legs.”

He touches her wrist, pulls one hand away from her face. “Hey.” He smiles, hoping she’ll smile back. He’s missed that. “Welcome home.”

Elizabeth wraps her arms around his shoulders, then practically goes limp in his arms. She laughs into his neck, a vaguely hysterical sound.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” she says.

***

He brings her to his place. Elizabeth falls asleep in the passenger seat of his car before he’s even out of the parking lot, and he worries if they go back to her place she’ll start cleaning out her fridge before getting a full night of much-needed rest. It’s been at least a week since he put fresh sheets on his bed, but he’s pretty sure that, in her current state, she won’t care.

He’s right about that, because when he leads her from the car into his townhouse, she doesn’t even seem to wake up enough to recognize that she’s not at home.

She sleeps for eighteen straight hours. He tiptoes around, sleeps on the couch, walks down to the corner store to stock his fridge with essentials like cereal and bread and TV dinners.

When he comes back from the store, his shower’s running. When she finally emerges, she’s dressed in his bathrobe, skin pink from hot water, bare legs, hair dripping.

“Good morning,” she greets him, collapsing onto his couch.

It’s actually evening, but he doesn’t correct her. “How did you sleep?”

“Like the dead,” she answers easily. “Thank you. Has my phone been ringing off the hook?”

It buzzed at least twice from the pocket of her carryon, but he doesn’t want her to check it just yet. “No. I think they’re giving you a break. I can make grilled cheese.” He even bought a tomato to put on her sandwich — she thinks grilled cheese is incomplete without them, he thinks it’s absolutely disgusting to contaminate bread and cheese with nutritional vegetable content. She’s the one who just came back from a war zone, though, so she wins.

She smiles so broadly it looks like she’s going to cry. “That sounds wonderful.”

He serves her the sandwich and his crappy bargain coffee that she always mocks. He’s not hungry, but he sits next to her.

She only pokes at her meal, though by all rights, she should be starving. The bathrobe slips down over one of her shoulders and she draws it back up, almost in slow-motion.

“Do you want to talk about what happened over there?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know what to say.”

“That bad?”

She sets the coffee down, runs one hand over her face. “I’m getting too old for this.”

He wants to tell her to quit, now while she’s vulnerable and might agree, but that’s too selfish to do, even for him. He wants her to stay here, with him. He wants to hold her, to kiss her, to be _with_ her in an honest, intentional way, to be something more real and permanent than the not-quite-just-friends they’ve always been. This is the only thing that still feels right: taking care of her, her taking care of him. He doesn’t want her to leave again, not for Russia or for the Sudan or even for Atlantis, if she ever has that chance again.

Maybe that’s all he’s ever wanted from her.

“It was really hard,” Elizabeth says. “And... it didn’t even matter. Everything’s worse now than it was before.”

“You did the best you could.”

“And has ‘doing your best’ ever been enough for _you_?” She leans her head on his shoulder. She’s tactile by nature, always has been, but this is a new vulnerability. “God, John. There was nothing I could do. I just wanted it to be over.”

He turns toward her enough to brush her wet hair away from her face. “It’s over now.”

“Until next time.”

Something sharp catches in his throat, because there will be a next time, and they’ll both have to go through this all over again. “Until next time.” He tries to memorize the weight of her head resting against him. “You saved an entire galaxy once upon a time, remember?”

She laughs. “I guess that’s something.”

“Take a break,” he suggests. “Let someone else babysit the planet for a while.”

He can’t tell if she’s teasing or actually considering it. “And what would I do?”

There’s only one answer. “Nothing.”

She breathes deeply a few times, her chest rising and falling next to him. “That sounds nice.”

***

A week after she gets back, they go to the ocean.

John hates the Earth oceans after Atlantis, and tells her as much. Elizabeth misses water, though, and he goes along because she invites him, and because it might not be so bad in the company of someone who understands.

Besides, he’s not quite ready to let her out of his sight. He can’t follow her into war zones on the other side of the globe, but he can follow her to Massachusetts.

They stay in a Cape Cod beach town recommended by General Keane’s wife. She’s a descendant of Mayflower New Englanders and, more importantly, knows someone who rents furnished beach cottages.

It’s November with patches of freezing rain — not the best time for an ocean vacation in New England — but then, this is hardly the strangest thing they’ve ever done. They’re both soaked and cold by the time they bring in their duffel bags and groceries. Elizabeth shakes the icy pellets from her hair in the cottage entryway while he fumbles with the thermostat. “I guess surfing is off the table.”

Not that he surfs anymore. “It’s not my fault you decided to do this in November.”

“You didn’t say anything when I suggested it.”

Neither of them ever really picked up the rhythm of Earth seasons again. John misses Atlantis’ perpetual summer, though when he was there, he rarely had time to enjoy it.

“Besides, there’s fewer tourists,” Elizabeth adds, ever the optimist. “Don’t give me that look. There’s a fireplace.”

“Are you going to make the fire?”

She rolls her eyes at him. “Depends. Is it the kind that lights with a switch?”

“Nope.” There’s a stack of wood piled neatly next to it, along with instructions for getting a fire started, for cottage renters who never spent nine years building campfires with alien wood in another galaxy.

Elizabeth smiles brightly. “Then it’s your job.”

He smirks, enjoying the familiar hint of command in her voice. “Yes ma’am.”

***

Even with the fire and the baseboard heaters, it takes a while for the cottage to warm up.

“Go sit next to the fireplace,” Elizabeth nags. She’s making dinner, a thick winter soup. “It’ll be better for your back.”

“I’m keeping you company,” he tells her, propping a pretzel in his mouth. He likes watching her be so terrestrially domestic; it still seems strange, no matter how long they’re on Earth. In Atlantis, he knew she’d send an army to rescue his team from danger, but it seems infinitely more bizarre that she’s making him dinner.

“I didn’t know you cooked,” he tells her.

“I try not to,” is her easy answer. “And don’t call it cooking until you try it, but I can make a few things. My mother was a master chef.”

“Mine made a mean TV dinner.”

Elizabeth laughs. She stops stirring the soup long enough to take a few sips from her wine glass. “Were you the first house on your block with a microwave?”

“We were the first house on our block with a _broken_ microwave, too. My mom said not to put metal in it...”

“... so of course young John Sheppard found the nearest fork and had to try it.”

“It was a toy car, actually.” He grins. “Scientific method. It’s important to test these things.”

“Does Rodney know this story? I don’t think it would surprise him.”

“Somehow, it never came up.”

She smiles, that mischievous expression that hasn’t changed in twelve years. It’s hard to remember now exactly when he first saw it, first started to uncover her sense of humor, but he _does_ remember how it made him feel: like they were on the same team. Partners. “You’re just lucky my phone plan doesn’t cover the Asgard galaxy, or he’d be hearing about it right now.”

“So there’s some benefit to terrestrial exile after all.”

She smirks, getting the joke as only she can. He thinks about what Rodney said to him when John was recalled — _So you’re just giving up and leaving the rest of us here to finish this fight?_ — and winces. Rodney wasn’t being fair, of course, but that’s Rodney.

John should have known better, when it was Elizabeth packing her bags. He accused her of abandoning them, professionally, but he abandoned her personally, and probably when she needed him most. He doesn’t know how he can ever apologize for that.

Elizabeth dips a wooden spoon into the soup and then holds it out to him. “Feeling brave?”

Being here with her, driving through the ice and building her a fire and sitting in the kitchen while she invents a soup recipe, he feels more like the brave soldier he used to be than he has in years.

“It’s delicious.”

She frowns. “It doesn’t need salt?”

In truth, he barely tasted the soup. He wants to pull the spoon away and kiss her hand. The feeling in his chest is warmly familiar — having one conversation with Elizabeth, meaning another. “Maybe a little. I’m not much of an expert on gourmet cooking.”

“You’re too easy to please, Sheppard.”

It’s been a long time since he’s been this pleased by anything.

***

He can’t really tell the difference when she adds salt to the soup, but it tastes great. Even better, with her leg touching his on the couch closest to the fireplace, as they laugh about all the awful things they had to eat in a foreign galaxy.

He’s glad he has already finished his dinner when she gets around to mentioning their goodwill visit to the Kolrasaans.

“I felt like the whole platter was _watching_ me,” Elizabeth says, shaking her head as she makes a face. She takes a gulp of wine, as if washing the taste out of her mouth.

John tops off her glass and his before putting the empty bottle aside. He doesn’t drink much anymore since Doctor Hayworth dressed him down, but this is a special occasion. “At least the eyes weren’t still alive.”

Elizabeth shudders. “Don’t remind me. Dreyna did really enjoy keeping that... thing you brought back as a pet, though.”

He laughs, pushing against her knee with his. “That was meant for you. The Premier of Pirin would be very disappointed if he knew you gave away such a delicacy.”

“Hopefully he’d have gotten over it by now.”

Her cheeks are red with warmth and wine, and John can’t resist staring. It almost feels like they’re back there, in one of the Atlantis lounges. The ocean air was warm, but different than the earthy heat of burning maple.

The smell, the crackling and popping as the logs burn and settle, it reminds him of youth, before he ever knew about Atlantis.

His own voice surprises him. “I don’t entirely hate being back on Earth.” He’s wondered, for a while now, if Earth is even really his problem.

Elizabeth sets her wine glass down and turns on the couch to face him, propping her elbow on the cushion behind her. “It’s where we’re from. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that we were only ever visiting Atlantis.”

“Eventually, we might even remember not to plan beach vacations in the winter.”

She pouts, eyes twinkling. “Maybe I just wanted to make you build a fire.”

She’s so close to him. Close, and warm, and the hand that was draped over the back of the couch is now brushing his shoulder with a gentle, casual touch that sends bursts of energy up and down his spine.

He’s been half-dead for years, it feels like. He’s so _tired_ of worrying that if he opens up, she’ll leave him alone. Again.

But here, retired — she’s the only thing on Earth he wants.

_What the hell,_ he thinks, watching her mouth, and he kisses her.

She breathes in surprise, the action drawing air between their lips, and then... she kisses him back.

Her lips are cool compared to the heat of the fire, welcoming, refreshing. He feels like he’s kissed her before, because he knows her so well, because he’s dreamed this so many times, because it’s almost too much to take in that it’s _real_. He expects her hand coming up to touch the sensitive skin under his jawbone, anticipates the direction she’ll tilt her head to let him in deeper. When her tongue brushes against his, arousal surges through him like he’s a much younger man.

Like he’s still in his thirties, the city bursting through the surface of the ocean and Elizabeth next to him, both _way_ over their heads. He doesn’t even remember the first time he saw her and _wanted_ her, because everything was moving so fast around them. He came so close so many times, when Athosian wine was buzzing through his head, all those late nights reviewing reports, the infirmary when her fever finally broke and he was sick with the thought that he needed her and he almost lost her. He always thought they’d have time.

He has that, now.

Her hands skim up underneath his shirt and his whole body jerks toward her. Her _hands_, touching him, pulling him closer into her, her mouth soft and wet, the body he’s been dreaming about for years. His blood is pounding so fast he can barely breathe and every bit of will in his body just wants to press against her, but this—

He has one last coherent thought in his head, and it’s that after twelve years, _twelve years_, this can’t just be a kiss that got carried away. He can’t regret anything else when it comes to her.

When he pulls back, he’s left looking at her face, inches from his, her hand warm on his thigh and his gut coiled tight with desire. She licks her lips, her whole body shuddering on a breath, and he can’t look away.

But if he pushes her too far—

“Is this...” he struggles to find words in a brain that’s mostly full of her, of the shivering trails her fingers left on his ribs. “Do you want to wait?”

Elizabeth laughs, his favorite sound, and she cups one hand over his cheek. He feels like she’s opening him up, letting free all the things he’s been stewing in alone since they came back to Earth. She asks, smiling, “What in the world are we waiting for?”

***

The master bedroom is cold with the living room fireplace drawing all the heat. There’s another fireplace in here, but John would rather keep Elizabeth warm another way.

They’re already kissing in the doorway, and the longer he touches her, the more amazing it seems. It felt like a dream on the couch, but when she shoves her duffel bag off the bed and then tugs his hands to encourage him to join her, it feels more real than anything he’s experienced in far too long.

_Yes,_ he thinks, sinking down onto the mattress, Elizabeth stretched out next to him. This is what he wants.

And it’s _happening._ Her hand brushes through his hair as she kisses him. He pulls back and pushes up her shirt just enough to give him clear access to the fasten of her jeans. He’s had years to imagine — consciously or otherwise — how he’d like to undress her, and now that he can, he wants to feel her long legs first.

Her skin is pale, textured with goosebumps from the chill, and his heart flips over at just how _beautiful_ she is.

She peels his shirt off and then trails her fingers down through the hair on his chest. He tenses when her fingers brush his belly.

He’s older than he was. Softer. Far from the able soldier who once served under her command.

“Ticklish?”

He feels exposed, vulnerable, and she’s looking at him with so much affection, so much _desire_. “Never used to be.”

A smile breaks across her face, and God, he loves her. “Good.”

He’ll never get tired of kissing her, not ever. The rest of their clothes come off, piece by piece, slowly, because he can’t bring himself away from her mouth. He fills his hands with all the skin he’s never had the chance to touch before, with her breasts and her hips and the coils of hair pointing him down between her thighs, and she breathes faint words between his lips — _yes, come on, John_ — and he trembles every time she says his name. Moving against her, his erection hard against her thigh, it’s blowing his mind.

She keeps talking as they explore each other — “John, you feel so good.” She keeps repeating his name, like she knows what it’s doing to him. “I want this. _John._”

_Yes._

He pushes her hair back from her face, his mouth dry, hips aching to _move,_ to push inside her. He can barely finish a thought, his whole attention used on sensation, and his body and heart and mind are in a rare alignment: he wants to know her, inside and out.

He can’t think of a thing to say that would get close to how he feels. All he can do is look at her, and hope she can read him as well as she always has.

She’s always the one who finds the words: “I want you.”

_Yes,_ he thinks, years of wanting her driving his urgency, but his back twinges sharply when he settles his knees between her legs. He tries to take back the noise he made, because the last thing he wants to do right now is stop. _Not now,_ he wants to scream at his failing body that’s already taken so much away from him. _Not now!_

Elizabeth’s hand is on his ribs, and she’s looking up at him, worried.

“It’s fine,” he says, trying to keep pain out of his voice. “Stupid back.”

Her expression relaxes into a wicked grin. “Over,” she says, with all the decisiveness of an order given from her post in the control tower.

John spent a year fighting her authority, but that was ages ago in a galaxy far, far away. Here, as he settles onto his back, he’ll let her take charge all day.

“Are you okay?” she asks, above him. His erection is throbbing in her hand, draining him of thought, so close _so close so close_—

_Yes,_ he thinks desperately, _yes, this._

“I’m perfect,” he assures her, and then she _sinks. onto. him._

“_Christ,_” he breathes as lights go off at the edges of his vision. She’s tight, hot, and it’s _Elizabeth_ around him like this, compressing him, and God, it’s been forever, and it’s never been her. His hands go up to her breasts, feeling her, helping hold her up, and he’s almost too overwhelmed to breathe as she starts to ride him.

_Yes._ Her muscles fluttering around him, squeezing, lighting up his every nerve with _sensation_ so intense it shoves all the pain from his body until there’s nothing but this.

_Yes._ Nothing but her.

_Yes._ Her face, watching him, and he couldn’t look away if he wanted to. He sees her orgasm building in her expression, her mouth going slack as she changes her angle and moves even faster, and God, he wants to experience this, wants to hold on and watch her come, but it’s too much, it’s _Elizabeth_, and he feels himself thrusting up to meet her, watching pleasure rise in her face every time they come together and—

“Yes,” she says on a choked breath, her nails digging into his shoulders, and he grits his teeth, thinking _come on, Elizabeth, come on_—

When she comes, John thinks he might be dying, thinks she might be pulling his last breath from him with the crush of her muscles pulling him in, and he can’t imagine a better way to go, can’t imagine anything in the universe he’d want more than this. He’s moving helplessly, without thought, hips jerking up against her, adjusting their angle so he’s even deeper inside her as she shudders above him, and he comes on a groan so hard that he can’t breathe.

For long minutes, afterwards, Elizabeth’s weight on him and John feeling wholly drained, he doesn’t want to open his eyes. She kisses him and he kisses back blindly as his heart starts beating again, trying to take this in.

It’s real. It’s her. _Finally._

He has to look when she moves, though, when she slides off of him, because he still has a few nerves she hasn’t fried and he shivers at the cold without her.

Grogginess tugs at him so sharply he can barely talk, but he knows he wants her to stay closer. “Where’re you—”

“Bathroom,” Elizabeth says, kisses his temple. He wants to watch her go, but her kiss is the last conscious thing he remembers.

Until untold minutes later, when she slides back in next to him. He turns to curl around her air-chilled skin, pulling her close.

She sighs, kisses his hand where it ended up near her face, and it relaxes him through to his bones.

***

His back wakes him, complaining at the unfamiliar mattress, the exertion last night, the unusual position caused by a beautiful woman curled in his arms.

It’s still cold — probably part of the problem — and freezing rain is pelting the windows with sharp _plik_s.

Elizabeth sleeps through him making a fire — amazing, when he thinks of all the times he found her in the control tower at 0300 because she “couldn’t sleep” — and stirs only when he gets back in bed next to her.

“Good morning,” he says.

Elizabeth shifts so her head is resting on his chest. He doesn’t think anything could feel better than last night, but her smile against his bare skin is a close second. John kisses the part in her hair, where her natural streaks of gray are growing in.

After another minute, she shifts, and he can see her face. He still can barely believe it. She’s _here._ He’s here. After all the years of waiting, of being angry and bitter and lonely...

Like she can read his mind, she says, “That was a long time coming.”

He laughs. “We’re stubborn people.”

John expects her to argue, to point out — probably rightly — that it’s more his stubborn fault than hers, but she just nods. “Sounds ugly out there.”

He caught sight of the ice-slicked wonderland outside when he went to the living room for firewood, but he didn’t put much thought into it when he’s got food and wood and Elizabeth in bed.

“Got somewhere to be?” He tries to say it casually, but some habits are hard to break, and expecting her to leave — expecting he’ll let her — is one of them.

Elizabeth’s brow wrinkles. Her eyes are intense, searching his face, and he really hopes she can live with whatever she sees.

He’s owed her this for a long time. “I fucked up,” he says. “In Atlantis. I took it out on you, when you left, and I should have been there for you.”

Her mouth twitches. “Yes,” she says, not unkindly. She always seems to forgive him before he forgives himself. “You should have.”

He touches her cheek. “I’m sorry.”

She lays one hand on his heart. “I know.”

***

He’s reading a military thriller, in theory, but it’s hard to get through more than a few wildly inaccurate paragraphs with Elizabeth so close to him, her feet in his lap.

John thinks she’s actually reading, but she smiles whenever he rests his hand on her ankles or pokes at her fluffy winter socks.

Finally, she closes the book, leaving one finger between the pages to keep her place, and raises an eyebrow. “Do you want to do something else?”

He’s not sure if she means sex, but the answer is yes... later. He got to eat her out a few hours ago, got to stretch her over the fireplace-warmed bed and _taste_ her the way he’s been wanting to for God knows how long, and after watching her come apart, mouthing his name, he barely made it inside her before he was done. He needs to recharge, and he needs to give his back a break if he wants to continue this _having sex_ thing without medical intervention.

He still hates the painkillers, but it was somehow easier to take them sitting in bed, next to her, with her hand rubbing up and down his aching spine.

“I’m good,” he assures her. “This book is just terrible.”

She pulls her reading glasses down her nose to glance at the cover he’s holding. “But _paperbacks-dot-com_ speaks so highly of it.”

He rolls his eyes and ends up just looking at her, enjoying the warm relief that fills him just being here. The freezing rain stopped outside and the sun came out enough to see peeks of gray water through the ice-laden trees.

“I think we should stay at the ocean,” John finds himself saying. He could do with ignoring the rest of this planet for a while — maybe forever. “I’ve always wanted a beach house.”

Elizabeth’s face turns serious. “I’m not ready to retire.”

He nods. He knows that. “I was.”

“Were you really, though? Doing nothing makes you miserable.”

John feels like he needs something to do with his hands, so he puts down the novel and starts squeezing her feet in an improvised massage.

“I don’t like this,” he admits. “I just don’t know what else to do.”

She sits up, touches his shoulder. “You’ll find something.” It doesn’t feel like the kind of pat assurance Doctor Hayworth would give him, or General Keane. Elizabeth _knows_ him, like few people ever have, and he believes her. Deep down, no matter what happened, he never stopped trusting her with his life.

It still hurts, though, when he thinks of how he’s no longer entrusted with hers. “It’s hard to let you go out there without being there to watch your back.”

Elizabeth swallows. Her eyes are suddenly watery. “I know. I don’t know how much more I have in me. But until then...”

He squeezes her ankle with a promise. “I’ll be here.” Being on Earth alone felt like exile, but being on Earth with her, feeling alive and in love and trusting she’ll come back whenever she leaves...

He thinks he could find a way to be happy.

Elizabeth touches his face, and he feels his heart speed up. _This_, this is what he always wanted.

“Find me a beach house to come home to,” she says.

When she kisses him, he feels her smile on his lips.

*end*

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published for Sparktober 2011. Of all my fics, this one is my favorite.


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